Call Of Pripyat Complete Is Complete

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Popular Stalker mod series Complete has arrived at its third iteration, with the completion of Call Of Pripyat Complete. Complete hooray! The mod overhauls the visuals, the audio, the AI, the UI, as well as adding a bunch of other features such as the sleeping bag (for sleeping anywhere), and the fate of stalkers caught out in the emissions. There’s a trailer below. It’s rather pretty, in a bleak sort of way. You can completely download it here.

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The levels are the best proof since GTA:SA, that a good visual style can dominate over a not-so-good graphics engine. Unfortunately, the people and monsters look as if they were from a different game (that shiny plastic dark metal Unreal style) and don’t really fit in.
I like though, how it does so well in reminding me of the photo series someone made while driving though the radioactive zone of Chernobyl.

The kidofspeed site is apparently complete (ar ar) BS, and was even when it was written. Zone tours are pretty routine and easy to get onto. There’s not nearly the excitement and adventure depicted (apparently she and her boyfriend went on a tour like everyone else, only she wore riding leather and a helmet, to the confusion of the army tour guides).
It’s a fun read though.

If you want a real look around, check this video tour. Lots of Stalker relevant places visited. It’s still a dangerous place too, as the geiger counter shows when they drive (very quickly) through Red Forest.

Incidentally, I think Barefoot’s mad. The humans and monsters are wonderfully designed and rendered, don’t look anything like any Unreal engine and fit beautifully into the landscape.

You know, as I looked at those Chernobyl pictures I got a sense of deja vu took me 5 minutes to realize what from and it wasn’t Stalker.

It was the sniper level in CoD: Modern warfare – makes you realize the effort of detail and realism they went for in that level in order to give it a real atmosphere The swimming pool on chapter 24 and the bumper cars (dodgems) on 18 especially.
Reminds you just how much a difference it makes when a Dev team are making the game they want to make instead of phoning it in due to sequel demands from the publisher (MW2).

I’d say you’ll have no problem finishing Just Cause 2 to at least 90% – that’s everything other than the godawful challenge races. My OCD kicked in enough to get that far, but even that couldn’t compete with the yawnful irritation of guiding an unwieldy plane through ground level checkpoints in a throwback to the very worst element of GTA:San Andreas.

On a side note – excellent, this gives me the excuse I’ve been waiting for to replay STALKER:COP to the last area, where I lost my savegames the first time around.

I would really, really like to play JC2, but I found the controls unbearable. I must have fumbled around for 2 hours on that initial “hop around the jeeps” chase at the beginning, getting my ass kicked time and again as I fought with my reticule. One of my main issues was the inability to bind the “E” key off of… whatever it does default (I use ESDF for movement, not WASD). So I’m wondering: Is JC2 better played with a – heaven forbid – gamepad? Or is the keyboard and mouse fine for most people?

On topic, seeing this mod bumped CoP to the top of my re-install list from having just reformatted.

@Highstorm
I’ve been using the keyboard/mouse for the on-foot side, and the XBox360 Controller Emulator, found here, with a joystick, for the vehicles. Doesn’t really help with your remapping “E” though. Analog control helped immensely with steering.

Of course, the reason I stopped playing was because I had about a dozen quests on my log of which there were a grand total of two where I knew what the hell I was supposed to be doing, and I could complete neither at that point in the game.

Seriously, I love how immersive and atmospheric the STALKER games are, but there’s a fine line between “realistic” and “obtuse” and they crossed it and kept going.

I don’t know how it can get “obtuse”. I take it you’re not just a corridor shooter guy who would be confused by a bifurcation and refuse to read text on a principle, but seriously, what’s so complicated in CoP ? A quest, a map marker, a direction on the compas. That’s exactly what WoW is doing this days…

But if you don’t understand your character’s motivation, there’s no thematic resonance in his course of action; you’re just mechanically shooting the mans in the heads. I want to know who it is that grips the Chaser 13 shotgun, and what his favorite bedtime story was as a child.

That was probably my favourite thing about CoP; the fact it didn’t lead you by the nose at all. An ‘objective’ is often more like a clue that something needs to be done, found or figured out. No clue as to where or how. Use your friggin head, it says.
I love it.

You must be playing a different game from me. I have quests which quite literally read as “find this guy who went in an unknown direction”. It doesn’t help that even when I found out additional information the quest log will never ever update so I tend to forget it.

So far I’ve solved several quests by simply stumbling into them, and as far as I know that was the only way to do it. This removes any sense of accomplishment and any motivation to do others like them.

I can only think of two missions like that. The first is where you have to find out the fate of the two friends of the mechanic in Zaton, and the second is when you have to find some guy who is killing Stalkers, or something like that. And yeah, in both cases they don’t give you any further information on them, because the NPC’s giving the jobs have no clue where to even begin. But it seems disingenuous to act like most of the missions are like this. They’re not. Almost all of the missions you’re given give you very clear waypoints as to where to go.

re: Xocrates
No, sounds even more like the same one.
It’s probably the Magpie quest that’s bugging you. And yeah you ask around for a while and get nowhere until out of the blue you overhear some conversation and get some more clues.
Doesn’t sound too out of keeping with what might happen in life to me though.
People approach these games in this weird trad RPG completist mode, which is understandable I guess, but inapproriate. If you play it like everything the game tells you to do you have to do and you’re the hero you’re kinda missing the point. The world is much bigger than you and your quest, and you decide your level of involvement. That’s what they’re going for here. It’s not always perfectly executed, but it made sense to me.
Anyway, I had to solve quite a few puzzles and join lots of dots myself and generally in the order and pace that I pleased and enjoyed it immensely. The game not giving feedback every step of the way did not dim any sense of achievement.
At times I was very close to taking notes, which I haven’t had to do in a game since I was a kid. It was nice to remember that sensation of being in way over my head.

I’ve completed the Magpie Quest, and half of the two friends quest. And yeah, those are probably the biggest culprits of this, but by no means the only ones.

Heck, plenty of story missions give you vague goals and no idea of when/where you can complete them. This was also one of the problems I had with the original, especially since the quest log was adamant about not updating even when it was obvious that certain quests goals had changed.

Although to be fair, my issue is less the quests being vague and more the quest tracking being horrendous, since, as I noted, it will never update a quest text to reflect newly acquired knowledge and the basic dialogue log is not exactly a suited place for looking for this info when you forget about it.

EDIT: And just so you have an idea where/why I got stuck: I currently need to find a protection suit of some description, asking around I’m told I can get one in some bunker. I head to the only bunker I know of (since the quest tracker will certainly not update with a map marker or anything despite me being told an exact location) and, indeed, they appear to have one.
Of course, I can talk to anyone in the bunker and I don’t even have the option to ask about said suit, and they certainly won’t acknowledge they have it in idle conversation, meaning I have no idea even if I’m in the right place.

I even like that the quests aren’t tracked. In fact I think that’s a significant part of it. Means you have to pay attention or get lost in it all ocassionally. Then I’m one of those who likes hard games. One of my fondest gaming memories is getting completely lost in System Shock and having to hide in a corner in Maintenence where the mutants couldn’t find me and comb through every single log in order to figure out what little off the cuff clue I had missed. There was no quest log to refer to.

Anyway, there’s times where CoP does seem more obtuse than necessary, or perhaps some translation problem assumed you’ll go to the right place and the possibility that you or the translation will cause misunderstanding wasn’t considered.
Their dialogue trees and so on could use some more detail if they continue on this route anyway, I generally agree.

If you’re gearing up for the Jupiter Underground you can just buy up a lot of Seva suits to get you over. From memory the other objectives about getting them are just methods if you are stuck for money.

The previous complete mods didn’t up the performance requirements that much. There are a few cases where textures are replaced with higher res textures and a few more shader effects, but a lot of what they did made the game look a lot better without really requiring any more computing resources.

Unfortunately the user manual for the mod states you need at least 1GB of GPU memory and 4GB of system memory to run it, or you will start getting “out of memory” crashes :( This is my first comment here at RPS, sorry to make it doom and gloom … Manual can be read here link to dolgovstudio.com

@Stevostin: I don’t think I won’t be able to run it, I know. I already own CoP and had to shelve it because of bad performance. It’s the only game I own that I can’t play at high/max settings. I’m not one to put graphics above gameplay, but CoP looks like a bowl of mushroom soup at low settings. It just doesn’t like my old x2 6000+ for some reason.

From what I understand it doesn’t change the story at all. It’s mainly just a graphical overhaul with a couple of tweaks to the AI and adds a sleeping bag so that you can sleep wherever you feel like it. I’ve played both Shadows of Chernobyl and Clear Sky with the Complete mod on, and I can attest to neither game being changed in the story way. Nor does it add a whole crapload of additional weapons like some of the other mods do. You’ll be getting a genuine Stalker experience with this, though I suspect you might want to wait a little while before downloading it. I may be wrong but I seem to recall the last two needing several patches shortly after being launched.

Had to turn down all textures. Had to use the crappiest lighting. The flippin’ ReadMe said you would need a 4gigs of ram and 1gig vram. Seriously! Maybe someday I’ll have a machine capable of running any pc game with all the bells and whistles but until then I shall remain as I always have with regards to pc gaming: watching you guys have all the fun while i sit outside in the cold and dark.

My 1GB GTS250 I bought for $80 quite a while back runs this and most modern games beautifully, and 4 gigs of ram isn’t exactly an extravagant expense either. Being able to play Stalker isn’t really ivory tower bro.

I don’t get how a lot of people have trouble playing that game. I have a Core 2 Duo @ 3 GHz and a Radeon 4870, and I remember playing 50 FPS plus most of the time with every parameter to highest. What’s your cfg people ?

Fantastic! I’ve actually had Pripyat sitting on my shelf (mostly) unplayed, waiting on this to be finished. SoC Complete was so head-and-shoulders above the vanilla version that I just decided to make the Complete playthrough my first playthrough.

Hmm. I still need to get back and play SoC, I’ve only played small bits. Should I avail myself of Complete? And what’s the deal with Clear Sky, it’s never bundled with the others on Steam. Black sheep much? Or just oddness?

Clear Sky (especially with the relevant Complete pack) isn’t a BAD game. It just shifts the focus to capture-and-hold objectives between NPC factions, rather than traditional questing.

Shadow of Chernobyl is more of a linear quest through hostile territory, with occasional backtracking. Call of Pripyat is the most open-world of the game, set across three ‘zones’, each with a couple dozen mission areas in.

Though I will say, that at this point, after numerous patches and with Clear Sky COMPLETE, Clear Sky is entirely playable and a very fun experience. Gone is the old days of instability and broken quests. I’ve been playing it recently and haven’t had anything go wrong yet.

Got this mod yesterday and reinstalled CoP. Gotta say it feels much more immersive with all the cool stuff. What I hate with stalker games is that they cook any graphics card you put on em. My gtx 570 goes 80 celcius degrees when playing CoP.

For those who haven’t tried them before, think of the Complete series (there’s one for each game so far) as huge fan-patches, rather than mods. Their stated goal is to change the game as little as possible, while gradually improving audio, visuals and AI, while squashing bugs and improving translations.

In short, if you’re going to start a STALKER game for the first time, install the relevant Complete pack. It makes it better. Not different, just straight-up better, as if the final game had an extra few months of testing and tuning before release.

There is one major gameplay difference in CoP Complete, but it’s entirely optional and actually asks you whether you want it or not during installation: You get to pick what happens to people caught outside during Emissions. Either they just die, they explode into a cloud of gibs, or they turn into zombies. The latter option means that you’ll see this wave of combat radiating out from safe-zones after each Emission, as NPCs fight off the undead.

What I saw in that trailer looked no better (or really much different at all) than the Atmosfear mod, which has been out for months and has the benefit of workarounds and integration with other mods like SGM.

If you’d actually read the mod description, Atmosfear is part (but by no means all of) of CoP Complete. But apparently NOBODY DOES. One thing that is hugely obvious the moment you start the game with CoP Complete is that they’ve reworked how textures change at distance. There’s no longer this wall of blurriness about fifty feet from you. Grass pop-up is barely noticable, and textures are sharper for much further out. At very long distances where things are inescapably blurred, they use the Depth Of Field effects to mask it further. It looks good.

And SGM is one of those hardcore gameplay overhaul mods, which is the exact polar opposite of what the Complete series is about.

I don’t even know which stalker is which anymore. Could they have not just included numbers?

I wanted to play through Stalker 1, but somewhere along the road I had to completely redo my system and I have no idea where the savegames are, if I even remembered to back them up.
And this is just not a game that was so super fun I’d love to rescavenge for all the halfway useable guns etc again.